Ecclesiastes, Fleeting and timeless

Biblical Philosophy

Conventional
readings of Ecclesiastes suggest as much. The description of Ecclesiastes
provided in the Encyclopaedia Britannica is a case in point: “The
author examines everything—material things, wisdom, toil, wealth—and
finds them unable to give meaning to life.”16 And yet, this
attitude is at odds not only with numerous passages in the text itself, as
cited above, but also with classical Jewish beliefs about the nature of
mortality. In fact, visions of the afterlife are discouraged in the
biblical narrative, and God is shown to place great value on man’s
actions in the material world. As such, it seems unlikely that
Ecclesiastes’ intention is to conclude that our involvement in the world
is without meaning.

If
we are to make sense of this challenging text, we must read it another
way. We should approach it as a text that is part of, and speaks to, a
broader biblical tradition. Indeed, to the assembled Israelites of the FirstTempleperiod, Kohelet’s famous opening
line—“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”—would have been instantly
recognizable as an allusion to another text in their unique intellectual
heritage: The story of Cain and Abel from the book of Genesis. The most
important clue to the mystery of Ecclesiastes, therefore, is found in the
striking reference it makes to the Bible’s first book